General tips & best practice

Structuring your website

Where do I start?

It may take a while, but auditing your site and finding out exactly what is on it (and where) is the first step in getting your website up to date.

What’s a website audit?

Like a tax audit, you’ll need to go through everything. Every page, photo, PDF, everything. Doing this will help you get a feel for what exactly is on your site and will provide you with the perfect opportunity to give your website a bit of a tidy.

During the audit you may find some content that you know is out of date, while other content you may not be sure about. You will need to liaise with other people to find out what you can keep, what can be cut and what needs to be updated.

While doing the audit, make a list of every page and what’s on it, including the URL for each page. This will help you restructure the information on your website, which will help your visitors find what they’re looking for quicker.

Where do I put it?

Put yourself in the shoes of your users when deciding on your website structure (information architecture). Your users have no idea how the different departments within your organisation work, so organising content by department will not make any sense to them.

Your new site structure should be a logical progression – group all like content together and make sure the page names are descriptive and in plain English – no jargon. The content list you made when auditing your website will be invaluable during this process.

Organising your site structure can be one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of updating your website. If you’re stuck, try asking someone from outside the organisation where they would expect to find certain information – this may give you some ideas.

Duplicated content

This can be a tricky issue. The best way to tackle this problem is to have content appear in only one place, but link to it from other relative places. For example, a page containing information for Junior players may be located in your Players section, but you could also link to it from other places; e.g. Player Development.